| Author Quoted | Karl Barth |
| Title Quoted | Christmas / translated by Berhard Citron |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1960/09/16 |
| Imprint | London : [s.n.]. 1959 |
| Quotation | Opposites: Karl Barth and Gemistus Pletho.15 I do not mean to be facetious. Gemistus (who attended the Council of Florence, from Greece) also wanted to revive the Olympian gods-who anticipated the Positivist Pantheon of A[uguste] Comte, who will doubtless be loved by magicians since he sounds like on"¦Pitiful, symptomatic, symbolic figure of the humanist renaissance. But Barth with his earnest, reforming Christianity, and his insistence that the Incarnation makes it impossible to invent even a Christian god-or to reach into "the infinit" to select our own concepts (idols) of them. Two extremes, but Barth is salutary. There is so much truth there, so much of the Gospel. |
| Quotation Source | Turning Toward the World: The Pivotal Years. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 4, 1960-1963.; Edited by Victor A. Kramer. / San Francisco : Harper Collins. 1996, p. 49 |
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| Link to Merton's Copy |
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